All, we’ve heard from a bunch of you who are concerned about Tumblr censoring NSFW/adult content. While there seems to be a lot of misinformation flying around, most of the confusion seems to stem from our complicated flagging/filtering features. Let me clear up (and fix) a few things:
1. Last year, we added “Safe Mode” which lets you filter out NSFW content from tag and search pages. This is enabled by default for new users and can be toggled in your Dashboard Settings. As some of you have pointed out, disabling Safe Mode still wasn’t allowing search results from all blogs to appear. This has been fixed.
2. Some search terms are blocked (returning no results) in some of our mobile apps. Unfortunately, different app environments have different requirements that we do our best to adhere to. The reason you see innocent tags like #gay being blocked on certain platforms is that they are still frequently returning adult content which our entire app was close to being banned for. The solution is more intelligent filtering which our team is working diligently on. We’ll get there soon. In the meantime, you can browse #lgbtq — which is moderated by our community editors — in all of Tumblr’s mobile apps. You can also see unfiltered search results on tumblr.com using your mobile web browser.
3. Earlier this year, in an effort to discourage some not-so-nice people from using Tumblr as free hosting for spammy commercial porn sites, we started delisting this tiny subset of blogs from search engines like Google. This was never intended to be an opt-in flag, but for some reason could be enabled after checking off NSFW → Adult in your blog settings. This was confusing and unnecessary, so we’ve dropped the extra option. If your blog contains anything too sexy for the average workplace, simply check “Flag this blog as NSFW” so people in Safe Mode can avoid it. Your blog will still be promoted in third-party search engines.
Aside from these fixes, there haven’t been any recent changes to Tumblr’s treatment of NSFW content, and our view on the topic hasn’t changed. Empowering your creative expression is the most important thing in the world to us. Making sure people aren’t surprised by content they find offensive is also incredibly important and we are always working to put more control in your hands.
Sorry for all of the confusion. If you have any more concerns or suggestions on how we can make these features clearer or more useful, please email us!
THE YEAR IS 2013
This was Tumblr Staff’s response to a Change.org 20,000 signature petition in 2013 to stop exactly what’s going on right now. Tumblr Staff, with David Karp at the head, clarified these things and put these guidelines into place to ensure that the site would remain safe and they would continue to allow NSFW content.
Tumblr, we made this clear before and now 10 times as many people are making it clear again: You’re handling this in the wrong way.
You should be focusing on improving features like Safe Mode, the tagging system, blacklisting, whitelisting, filtering, blocking, reporting, etc.
Rather than deciding that destroying the foundation you’ve built and garnered for 11 years as a place where NSFW artists can easily get their work out there.
And would you look at that, this post itself has like a million notes.
hot take but girls with ADHD don’t ‘present differently’, it’s just that misogyny punishes girls and people read as girls a lot more severely for their ADHD symptoms so most girls become way more proficient at masking their symptoms so end up being left undiagnosed and then just develop depression, anxiety, trauma and burnout over not being able to meet standards that are difficult if not impossible for people with ADHD and being harshly reprimanded for it
Ladies and Gentlemen, you might want to take off your trousers and slip into a bathrobe because things are about to get pretty steamy in here.
I’m beyond excited to officially unveil for you the beautiful cover of my upcoming book, “Strangers Assume My Girlfriend Is My Nurse!”
I’m sure many of you temporarily lost consciousness when your eyes fell upon the sheer sexiness of my girlfriend, Hannah, and I posing in such a sultry position, so I’ll give you a minute to regain your strength before I continue. I hope you’ll wipe up your drool and keep reading because I have a few very important things to say about this book.
My name is Shane Burcaw, and I was born with a lovely muscle-wasting disease called Spinal Muscular Atrophy. I’m working really hard to use my time on this earth to create a positive, lasting impact. Specifically, my goal is to change the way society looks at disability. This book is the next step in that journey.
One of the biggest stigmas about people with disabilities is that we are incapable and unworthy of romantic relationships. To give you an example, I run a YouTube channel with Hannah, and every time we post a new episode, people inevitably comment with theories as to why on earth we are dating. Here are just a few of my favorites:
“Don’t get me wrong – he seems like a good dude – but I ain’t buying it. She’s either his nurse or good friend and this is an act, or she’s got a couple screws loose.”
“Ask yourself, would you date him? NO, YOU WOULDN’T. What is the catch here?”
“This [relationship] is abnormal and frankly disgusting.”
Aren’t these fun? Jokes aside, this is but a small indication of the vast and innumerable ways that people with disabilities are discriminated against on a daily basis. I am determined to change that situation.
My strategy is humor. In “Strangers Assume My Girlfriend Is My Nurse” I use funny stories from my life to show readers that using a wheelchair is not some horrid, depressing existence. I’m a person, and my disability should not invoke pity or aversion, but rather, respect and love and kindness, just like we all deserve.
If you personally support that idea, please please please consider sharing this post. My ability to make a difference in this world is solely hinged upon spreading my story to as many people as possible, and YOU hold that power for me!
In celebration of my new book, and to raise funds for my nonprofit organization (which teaches children across the country about disability awareness and pride), I am hosting a HUGE online event scheduled for 8pm EST on November 27th. Entertainment will include a reading from “Strangers Assume”, an open Q&A where you can ask me anything you’d like, never-before-heard stories, and other special surprises! Your ticket purchase will help us provide adaptive technology to individuals living with muscular dystrophy in December 2018.
Thanks so much for reading and taking the time to share this exciting news. Below are all the important links you need regarding my new book and the live event on Nov 27th.
People in the notes are upset about “humanizing GWB” lmao
Important to note that he’s painting a series of portraits of veterans who were injured carrying out his orders in Iraq and Afghanistan as part of an art therapy program.
one of the more valuable things I’ve learned in life as a survivor of a mentally unstable parent is that it is likely that no one has thought through it as much as you have.
no, your friend probably has not noticed they cut you off four times in this conversation.
no, your brother didn’t realize his music was that loud while you were studying.
no, your bff or S.O. doesn’t remember that you’re on a tight deadline right now.
no, no one else is paying attention to the four power dynamics at play in your friend group right now.
a habit of abused kids, especially kids with unstable parents, is the tendency to notice every little detail. We magnify small nuances into major things, largely because small nuances quickly became breaking points for parents. Managing moods, reading the room, perceiving danger in the order of words, the shift of body weight….it’s all a natural outgrowth of trying to manage unstable parents from a young age.
Here’s the thing: most people don’t do that. I’m not saying everyone else is oblivious, I’m saying the over analysis of minor nuances is a habit of abuse.
I have a rule: I do not respond to subtext. This includes guilt tripping, silent treatments, passive aggressive behavior, etc. I see it. I notice it. I even sometimes have to analyze it and take a deep breath and CHOOSE not to respond. Because whether it’s really there or just me over-reading things that actually don’t mean anything, the habit of lending credence to the part of me that sees danger in the wrong shift of body weight…that’s toxic for me. And dangerous to my relationships.
The best thing I ever did for myself and my relationships was insist upon frank communication and a categorical denial of subtext. For some people this is a moral stance. For survivors of mentally unstable parents this is a requirement of recovery.
gifted student™ brains are about as functional as horses when you get right down to it
which sounds like a shit post but consider: horses? hypothetically MADE for running. look at this magnificent muscle beasts. look at those legs. they must be so good at running, right? wrong. horses are fragile as fuck. horses break their gotdamn legs so so easily, and if they break their legs you just have to fucking shoot them. if they run, the thing they are MADE FOR, too fast their lungs will start bleeding. I just googled horses to see if I was missing anything and apparently if they lie down for a day their organs start collapsing or something so they can’t rest from their One Horse Purpose even when they’re hurt. they’re made to do one thing but they can only do it under Very Specific Conditions and if a single thing changes they just die.
which, you know. gifted students™ get applauded for being naturally smart when we’re five or whatever and then develop a terrible inflated sense of self that makes us highly averse to anything we’re not naturally good at, because it challenges our fragile childbrain egos and if we wait too long we’ll develop mental fences around entire subjects and skillsets (mine are math and studying) because we think we’re Bad at them, when in reality we just need to practice but are frustrated by that because it’s harder than being ~naturally talented~ was. we get applauded for doing One Thing but the second we run into slightly different things that our brains don’t comprehend as readily? it’s a Bad Time. I still have so much anxiety over things I don’t feel Naturally Talented at that I’ve been sitting here writing this post for like 10 minutes rather than read the feedback on my religion paper. I got a 100% on it, but I’m still That Scared of anything other than straight heaps of praise because that’s what my childbrain was acclimated to. just send me to the glue factory already.
Its important to note that a lot of horse problems are because of how they are exploited by people, pushed too hard and made beasts of burden that they were never meant to be. I think this strengthens the analogy
I recently re-read Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology. The first time, I read it because I’m a huge Neil Gaiman fan. He’s probably my favorite contemporary fiction author, and American Gods is easily one of my favorite novels, with all of its magic crackling under America’s inherent weirdness. The second time, though, I read it with a more particular frame, to think more specifically about a cultural heritage that I have, as the descendent of Swedish immigrants, but one that I had not been taught or deeply considered.
Part of the desire to learn more about this cultural heritage and mythology comes from a place of personal history. Two years ago this summer, I took my then two-year-old son to Swedeburg, Nebraska, to bury my namesake, my great uncle Carl [1]. There in the cemetery surrounded by the mossy headstones of five generations of my Swedish Lutheran forebears, a sense of being from a place and having a thread back to another place out of my time and memory began to unspool. It’s been a quiet following of the thread, which feels only fitting for these stoic Scandinavians who came to farm the Midwest and start little churches and teach.
This contemplative unspooling has also come in the contemporary context of the Black Lives Matter movement, and with a desire to deconstruct the oppressiveness of what “White” means, as someone who definitely is lacking in melanin and comes genetically from northern Europe. Writing in the New York Times [2], professor and author Nell Irvin Painter says, “An essential problem here is the inadequacy of white identity. Everyone loves to talk about blackness, a fascinating thing. But bring up whiteness and fewer people want to talk about it. Whiteness is on a toggle switch between “bland nothingness” and “racist hatred.”…Eliminating the binary definition of whiteness — the toggle between nothingness and awfulness — is essential for a new racial vision that ethical people can share across the color line.”
Whiteness has always privileged my Protestant, northern European self. Even as it historically excluded Catholics, southern Europeans, and others, they have been, over time and in this country, sponged up into that emptiness. Whiteness is an erasure, of others and of the beneficiaries, an all-consuming blankness of power.
Breaking that toggle switch, filling that void of sameness, then, needs specificity. This is not to say that having a cultural heritage you are aware of and a participant in is a panacea for systemic injustice and prejudice, and history is filled with conflict because “you” are not like “me.” But if you are more aware of who you are and are comfortable with it, there is less need for an impulse to define yourself in opposition to, through power over others – if we white people are to dismantle whiteness, we need to know where to put ourselves.
Which brings us back to Norse mythology, something that I have claim to but have never learned. There is a grim inevitability in the Norse myths, in that we know how they end. All these tales are simply slouching towards Ragnarok, the final battle where the Aesir will be wiped out. In Gaiman’s hands it’s a dry, almost sardonic end, and one that is of the god’s own making, rooted in their own hubris and self-confidence. Odin, the All-Father, may have wandered the world, given up his eye and crucified himself for all the knowledge in the world, but all his power still makes him powerless to stop the end from coming. The strength of Thor and his hammer Mjölnir cannot win the battle.
The agents of this destruction are the children of Loki, the trickster god who the Norse gods don’t trust but believe they can control. Loki’s children are Jormungundr the Midgard serpent who is wrapped around the world and spits poison; Hel, the ruler of the dead who did not die valiantly, with her bowl Hunger, her knife Famine, and her bed Sickbed; and Fenris Wolf, the eater of the world, and enormous wolf bound and held captive through the treachery of the Aesir. The god Frey had a sword that could have defeated the fire demon Surtr, but he gave it up in pursuit of his wife Gerd.
As Gaiman puts it in his introduction, “It was the fact that the world and the story ends, and the way that it ends and is reborn, that made these gods and the frost giants and the rest of them tragic heroes, tragic villains. Ragnarok made the Norse world linger for me, seem strangely present and current, while other, better-documented systems of belief felt as if they were part of the past, old things.”
There is rebirth – man and woman survive Ragnarok and emerge from Yggdrasil, the immense tree of life that holds all the worlds together. Balder, Odin’s second son who was the “wisest, the mildest, the most eloquent” of the gods comes back from the underworld. If myths like this are passed down with morals or warnings that we are trying to discern or give our lives shape and meaning, then the promise of the world beginning anew, after foolishness, violence and destruction, that is worth holding on to. It also demands that we question ourselves and who we are in this, how our own actions and history must be confronted.
The other, more unsettling reason to read the Norse myths with an eye to dismantling whiteness is that white supremacists love their conception of Vikings, love a made-up all-white Norse myth, and have, through the prison-industrial complex, spread a racist version of Norse heathenism. [3] What would the All-Father say about these morons? Maybe Gaiman’s line about Ragnarok, “Twilight will come to the world, and the places where the humans live will fall into ruin, flaming briefly, then crumbling down and crashing into ash and devastation.”
David Perry of the University of Minnesota did have this to say about the misguidedness of Viking-loving white supremacists in the Washington Post [4], that “the Vikings of Europe did not exist in pure white racial isolation. The Vikings…tapped into rich multicultural trading networks — fighting when useful, but delighted to engage in economic and cultural exchange with great powers of Eurasia. That included the Jews of Khazaria, Christians dedicated to both Rome and Constantinople and Muslims of every sect and ethnicity. Islamic coins, in fact, have been found buried across the Viking world, a testimony to the richness of this exchange.”
There’s something profound about that exchange, pointing other ways forward than the pillaging, blood-soaked, domination stories and assumptions we’re living through. Whiteness does not have to exist in this way, we have been as flawed, as self-involved, as short-sighted and as vain as the Aesir, and there is an end coming. “Burn it to the ground,” like Michelle Wolf’s note before the White House Correspondent’s Dinner put it. [5] Or this excerpt from Danez Smith’s extraordinary new poem, ‘say it with your whole black mouth’: [6]
so many white people are alive because
we know how to control ourselves.
how many times have we died on a whim
wielded like gallows in their sun-shy hands?
here, standing in my own body, i say: the next time
they murder us for the crime of their imaginations
i don’t know what i’ll do.
i did not come to preach of peace
for that is not the hunted’s duty.
i came here to say what i can’t say
without my name being added to a list
A coda, of sorts. I think a lot about these Scandinavians on the prairie, and what they did to survive, and who they displaced to turn the open fields into farmland, and I don’t have any resolution in that. But I did, last weekend, find an extraordinary collection of poems, Sacred Hearts, by Phebe Hanson, published by Milkweed Editions in 1985. [7] The daughter of a Lutheran pastor who grew up on the prairie and then moved to Minneapolis to become a teacher, she immediately fit into my constellation of great aunts. The collection is full of spare, precise, and unblinking examinations of mortality, gender expectations, sexual violence, and change. For poems a year younger than I am and about experiences far older, they are also poems for now. This, from ‘Why I Have Simplified My Life,’ knocked me flat:
I was looking over the post-Return Sherlock Holmes stories, and finally put something together about the dates.
“The Three Garridebs” case begins in June of 1902. All signs indicate that Watson is still resident at 221B at this point. We all know how that case ends.
“Illustrious Client” begins on September 3, 1902, with the famous trip to the Turkish baths. At that point, Watson says, he was “living in my own rooms in Queen Anne street at the time.”
“Blanched Soldier” begins in January, 1903. Holmes is still in his consulting-room in London, but Watson doesn’t appear in this case and Holmes narrates. And he is BITTER: “The good Watson had at that time deserted me for a wife, the only selfish action which I can recall in our association. I was alone.”
“Creeping Man” is dated September, 1903. This is the one where Holmes sends Watson the famous “Come if convenient, if inconvenient come all the same” telegram, and Watson’s narration says that their relations were “peculiar” at that time. Watson is also manifestly annoyed at being summoned for a case about a dog. Turns out it’s a case about a man who is in love with a younger woman and wants to impress her by augmenting his sexual potency via monkey gland secretions.
Holmes’s retirement to the Sussex Downs happens sometime in 1904, since it is announced in the introduction to “Second Stain.”
“Lion’s Mane” is dated 1907 and is the only story set during Holmes’s retirement (he comes out of retirement for “His Last Bow”). He mentions that “my house is lonely” and that “at this period of my life, the good Watson had passed almost beyond my ken.”
OK. So, in my own headcanon, I always located the Declaration and Consummation pretty soon after “Empty House,” based on the fact that the Return stories indicate a new level of physical and emotional intimacy (plus in “Norwood Builder” Watson sells his practice and moves back into 221B. Really, you don’t do that for a roommate).
However, if you look at these dates, it occurs to me that another narrative–one which I in no way like as well–would go like this.
Beltainefaerie's Flights of Fancy 